...In Which Camelids Explain It All To You... The Llama and the Paca True unite their cute furry spitting camelid forces to conquer evil and churn out blog stuff more frequently. Wonder Camelids unite! Shape of a pack animal! Form of wool-bearing, scarf-producing cuddly thing!

Saturday, June 02, 2007

paca emerges from his rock (paca)

So where've I been? Two places mostly. As mentioned a few days back, paternal grandpa and grandma on N's side are in town, so I've spent a good bit of time with them. At the same time, today was publication day for my journal. 148 pages, and some 50-60 thousand words, of yummy academic goodness. Since that was on a strict deadline, but I could not be in my office during much of the day, I was back to my old tricks of going to bed at 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM, midnight, and 1:00 am respectively. None of this left much room for inspiration for the blog. I did manage to pull off a pirate speak query letter in a comment over at Evil Editor's however. However, we did indeed publish today, and so that's now off my chest. The father-in-law also heads back to the Mainland tomorrow so things should go back to normal.

In other news, I can make a children's book recommendation. The Alley Cat's Meow by Kathi Appelt. It's the story of two dancing cats, Red and Ginger, swinging their way through love. It's told in rhymes which I find fun:

It was a full moon, jazz tuneswinging kind of nightwhen Red hopped the A trainand it rumbled out of sight.

And later when he sees Ginger for the first time:

She was jazzyShe was snazzyshe was my-oh-my-oh-my

And when Ginger sees Red

He was dashingHe was smashingHe was la-di-da-di-da

I enjoy it. It might be one of those books too old for children and too young for adults; however, it's working at our house. B likes saying the jazzy, snazzy line. The highlight of the book, however, are the remarkable paintings by Jon Goodell, the illustrator. The images I've found online don't do them justice, so I won't post.

The job now is to decide how to spend my summer. The job keeps going, and I will be doing some research and comps reading and Japanese... well, that might be enough. I'm still contemplating the Script Frenzy thing, though, even though it started today. We will see.